Change

One cannot think about change in politics without engaging in the debate between Marxism and liberalism. This entry concentrates on the French philosopher Alain Badiou's Marxist contributions to the discussion.

Reform versus revolution: Broadly speaking, these are the conceptions of change found in the [Page 160]two camps. Liberal philosophers counsel the gradual improvement of democratic institutions, whereas the Marxists claim the problems of capitalist society lie at a deep structural level and can be resolved only through the construction of a more equitable economy. The poststructuralist contribution to this debate, at least in France in the mid-1960s, seems to come down to outbidding the Marxists and claiming that the only genuine political change is one that would affect structures even deeper than those of private property and the social organization of production. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze invoke Friedrich Nietzsche in gestures toward the emergence of a new order of knowledge and thought and attempt to situate their own experiments in writing as auguries of this event. The challenge for Badiou, working in the wake of Marxism, poststructuralism, and the events of May 1968, was to theorize radical political change beyond economic determinism while insisting that such change be both concrete and independent of any philosophical gestures.

Badiou's initial attempt to theorize change occurs in his 1967 article “Recommencing Dialectical Materialism,” a review of Louis Althusser's work. Althusser attempts to analyze political change according to the model of an epistemological break where the latter designates transformations of knowledge such as that ensuing from Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity. The immediate implication is that politics is thought of, primarily, as an order of knowledge—knowledge of society and its components, of institutions, and of governmental practices. In Badiou's review of Althusser's project he identifies two difficulties, namely, the lack of a concept of the whole within which the change occurs and the limitation of change to being a reshuffling of elements within a given structure. Rather than ditching Althusser's project Badiou enlists mathematics in order to develop a more complex model of change in knowledge, whether that knowledge is scientific or political. In his most significant early publication, The Concept of Model, Badiou explains how change in mathematics occurs through the use of models, where certain theories or “syntaxes” are transposed and tested within various semantic fields to give rise to models of the theory. However, the relation between such gradual production of new mathematical knowledge and the widescale transformations of society that remain the horizon of Badiou's thinking is tenuous at best.

Badiou enlisted psychoanalysis alongside mathematics and Althusser in his treatment of change. He seized on two major ideas in Jacques Lacan's thinking, both found in Seminar 11: (1) The real—or the blockages an analysand must encounter in order to effectuate change during analysis—is a moment of impossibility within a symbolic order; and (2) a subject is not given but emerges in praxis, where a praxis, such as psychoanalysis, is the treatment of the real. In his article “Infinitesimal Subversion” Badiou argues that widescale transformations in mathematical knowledge occur when a point of symbolic impossibility is named. That is, a mark that is impossible in one symbolic order, such as the square root of minus one, is given a name (i for an imaginary number), thus opening up another possible series of numbers—a new symbolic order. If one transposes this operation to the current French political situation it is the act of naming of migrant workers as political subjects who rightfully belong to the symbolic order of the French Republic that begins to open up a new political space. Badiou developed this concern with nomination in the late 1960s, and it can be traced through to the present day in the concepts of “evental site” and “intervention” in Being and Event, and “event” and “inexistent” in Logics of Worlds.

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